Bill Hand: The erroneous Otway Burns

A columnist for the Tideland News has found an old column of mine and commented on its errancy. Since I try hard to correct errors that I make, I would like to spend this column apologizing.

Bill Hand, Sun Journal Staff

A columnist for the Tideland News has found an old column of mine and commented on its errancy. Since I try hard to correct errors that I make, I would like to spend this column apologizing.

The columnist started kindly enough: “Bill Hand, columnist for The Sun Journal, wrote an excellent piece on Capt. Otway Burns and the War of 1812 in the Oct. 11 edition…”

The column then cites a few facts I stated — who it was that hired Burns to captain a privateer, how Burns made lots of money for them both, and so on.

Then the columnist (I do not find the author’s name) concludes, “However, Hand mistakenly refers to Burns as ‘a noted seafarer from nearby Carteret County.’

“As well all know, Otway Burns, while buried in Carteret County, was born on the banks of Queens Creek in Onslow County near Swansboro.”

That column ran in 2010. A friend sent me this “Pelican’s” thing, and I don’t know its publishing date.

Burns was not born in Carteret County. I know that. I had not been aware that being “from” somewhere is automatically nailed down to one’s place of birth and nowhere else, but apparently it is and so I apologize.

I was born in Indiana, but it occurs to me to say I am “from” there. I connect myself with my home in New Bern (well… my post office address is New Bern even though I live out in the county someplace) and so I say I am “from” here. If someone asks, I will say I was raised in Pennsylvania. Not because Pennsylvania is easier to spell or less embarrassing that Indiana, but because I spent most of my life — 1958 to 1992 — there. I lived in Indiana only a year or so. But, apparently, I am “from” Indiana. Not Pennsylvania. Not New Bern. I apologize.

Otway Burns, the privateering captain of the 147-ton Snap Dragon, learned his seafaring in Beaufort. But he is not from there.

He commanded her for three cruises until the ship’s owners dismissed him after a South American incident I won’t go into. The Snap Dragon had one more tour under a new captain, when it was promptly captured by the British.

According to the highly reliable “Dictionary of North Carolina Biography,” Burns got the nasty surprise of finding his wife had left him when he returned. So he did what any red-blooded sailor would do and found a 20-year-old woman — a Beaufort girl at that — and married her in 1814. A year later, he bought a plot in Beaufort and built a house where he and his family lived for more than 20 years.

But he was not from Beaufort, and I apologize.

Having finished fooling around with the murky depths of the Atlantic, he decided it might be fun to ply the murky depths of Raleigh and so he ran for office, winning a seat in the assembly where he represented Carteret County. But he was not from Carteret.

That reminds me of how this egregious error is repeated in Washington, D.C., every time a senator refers to, for instance, “the honorable senator from Wisconsin,” even though that Wisconsin delegate may have been born in Mobile.

In any case, Otway Burns was not from Carteret County. Sorry, folks.

Otway Burns is buried in a picturesque little cemetery in Beaufort, where a cannon famously lies on top of his memorial. (Had he been a Catholic seaman, I suppose they might have placed a canon on his grave instead.) When one declares his preference for his burial, he usually picks a place that he considers home — a place that holds deep meaning to him. I imagine there were cemeteries in Onslow County in 1850 (when he died), but instead he picked Carteret County.

But he was not from Carteret County.

I don’t know what came over me to make me think he was.

However, Percy’s Pelican Perch mistakenly refers to Burns as being “born on the banks of Queens Creek.” Creek banks are awfully muddy for birthing. I’m pretty sure he was born in a house.

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